High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Russia in the Shadows is the title of the book published in 1920, which includes a series of articles written by H. G. Wells for The Sunday Express in connection with his second visit to Russia that same year. Wells was already famous for his celebrated The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine. During his visit to Russia he met his friend Maxim Gorky who arranged a meeting with Lenin. Wells’s vision of the young socialist republic wasn’t as candid as John Reed’s. Wells saw a country devastated by the war, blockade and foreign intervention; a country lost in the hands of the only force sufficiently organized to control the affairs of the nation: the Bolsheviks. Wells’s account of his sojourn in St. Petersburg and Moscow is crude, spares no details and pretends to capture not the imagination of the idealist but rather to provide the readers of The Sunday Express with an account, warning-–at the same time--Western nations of what dangers lay ahead should they not intervene to safeguard the integrity of Russia. During the interview with Lenin at the Kremlin (second to last chapter contains), Wells engages the leader and founder of Russian communism in a conversation about the future of what would become the Soviet Union.